Some students are just trying to crank out another paper on Shakespeare or the Civil War or photosynthesis to get through their senior thesis.
Derek Carty used his to create THE BAT baseball projection system. Best use of a college education we’ve ever heard of.
Carty devised The Bat to project player stats for season-long fantasy baseball in the mid-2000s. It was before daily fantasy sports had fully taken off and long before PASPA was repealed.
But once DFS blew up, he knew he could apply his projections to a new – and suddenly very popular – market to gain a huge edge on the field.
“There was a big hole in the market because no one was doing projections at the time,” Carty said. “I tailored it to work on a daily level accounting for things that don’t necessarily matter on a season-long level. Umpires and weather and that kind of stuff. It did really well. The first few years of DFS were like the wild, wild west without any sort of regulation. There was a lot of money to be made.”
Word got out and before long Carty found himself on ESPN talking DFS on Baseball Tonight.
As Carty became a presence in the space, he worked on a more powerful version of THE BAT. THE BAT X incorporates Statcast data into the projections.
And now you can use THE BAT X with Unabated’s Prop Odds Screen. This feature is currently in beta release.
Introducing the Unabated Prop Marketplace
THE BAT X is the first product in our new projections marketplace, where we’re making it easier to use existing popular projection sets with Unabated.
When you choose THE BAT X for your projections, a pop-up will direct you to EVAnalytics, home of THE BAT X. There, you can log in and, if necessary, purchase a subscription. Once your active account is verified, you’ll be able to load them directly into our simulator.
THE BAT X Projections Adapt to a Changing Season
Bat X projections have evolved over the course of a year that started with significant rules changes.
“The run environment changes a lot,” Carty said. “I built it to be able to adapt on the fly to changes in the run environment. It’s examining how quickly things stabilize on a league level and then having the system fold in new data to continually be adjusting. If the ball changes in the middle of the year, a week later the system should be able to tell you the run environment is completely different.”
Not only can run environments shift but team-level metrics become less reliable after the trading deadline reorders players across the league.
And that’s not even taking into consideration teams that, while they may not be explicitly tanking, may not be legging out those singles into doubles, either.
It’s an easy trap for baseball bettors to fall into this time of year.
“A lot of people make the mistake of thinking, ‘We’re four months into the baseball season. Guys have 400 plate appearances. This feels like a big enough sample. I’m going to trust that this is who this guy is,’” Carty said.
“They don’t realize how much noise we actually deal with in baseball. Four months of baseball is still not that big of a sample size. You can’t just focus on what happened this year and assume that’s going to continue. Historically, that’s not what happens. There’s enough noise where you still want to fold in older data. A lot of people don’t do that at this point in the year.”
Project the Gridiron Too
Carty’s football projections, The Blitz, will be available to use with Unabated’s prop marketplace in the coming weeks.
While there are heavy hitters out there doing NFL projections, the sport hasn’t caught up to where MLB currently is.
“Football is behind baseball analytically,” Carty said. “Moneyball happened 20 years ago and a lot of the concepts have been more or less widely accepted, but I still think there’s a lot of pushback in the football community against analytics. The really advanced stuff in football really isn’t publicly available. But I think there’s plenty of edge to be had even if you aren’t working with that in football.”
If you’re planning on focusing on player props this football season, Carty said there’s one piece many people seem to overlook. Though it should be familiar to bettors who work with basketball.
“Pace of game is one of the bigger things that tends to not be baked into lines as much,” he said. “People understand the importance of volume. You hear people talk about target shares and red zone opportunities. But I don’t think as many people consider the actual volume on a team level. Which is important if a team’s going to play fast or if they’re playing against a team that plays fast. That’s going to give them more total pace to run and more total opportunities, which is a big deal.”
Projections like THE BAT X and The Blitz can be blended with any other available projection sets – or your own numbers – to create a weighted mix of projections. Fine tune your blends, then run the simulator to see where edges are against real-time prop odds.
You can also use these projections with our DFS Entry Builder to put them to work finding the best edges at PrizePicks and Underdog.
If you’re ready to talk shop for props, come hang out in the Discord, where there’s always someone looking to find the right blend and break down their prop edges.
